Megabit/Megabyte blunder in report on TM HSBB

Found an old post in 2008 that tickled me…Either the reporter heard it wrong or TM’s Sarawak General Manager doesn’t know the difference between a megabit and a megabyte. For those not in the know, there are 8 bits to a byte hence the speeds he’s quoting are 8 times faster…which is highly unlikely. Minimum of 10 megabytes a second is basically almost maxing out a 100 mbit connection. That means downloading a typical 25 minute TV series at around 350 megabytes will take approximately 35 seconds? Dream on! And 1 gigabyte a second??? Even a SSD would not be able to write fast enough to keep up.

It will take only one minute to download a video once Telekom Malaysia Berhad’s High Speed Broadband (HSBB) programme takes off end of this year.

“If you are downloading a video on one megabyte per second, it might take hours. But now with HSBB, it will only take one minute on 100 megabytes per second to download the video,” said Telekom Malaysia Sarawak general manager Omar Zaki Mustafa.

“Customers can experience and enjoy high speed broadband service with a minimum of 10 megabytes per second, and that can go up to one gigabytes per second,” he added.

He said this was one of the new technologies and services that Telekom Malaysia would be introducing to its customers, and it had been given the mandate by the government to implement it throughout the country.

“Sarawak has been very fortunate in that it has been given the approval to roll out the HSBB in Miri, Bintulu, Sibu and Kuching while in other states except for Klang Valley, Johor Baru and Pulau Pinang, they are only allowed to implement the programme in one area,” said Zaki.

“Our Internet services are the normal one like Streamyx that can be upgraded to four megabytes per second.

“We also have a lot of customers who are demanding that TM Direct be upgraded from two megabytes per second to 145 megabytes per second,” said Zaki.